PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique violin in dispute

Let payments be payments like cash, and solve trust issues separately with things like escrow services.

There are plenty of ways to destroy it physically (throw it in a forge, bend it with pliers, etc).

I'm a bit more concerned that a scammer wouldn't destroy the coin per se, but make a claim on authenticity, causing me to lose my money and also the coin.

So to answer your question: In some cases, not well enough. ;)

EDIT: source: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/euro_coin_recy...

Funny fact: at that time it was illegal in my country (France). This law has been abrogated since then to allow machines that crush coins to make souvenirs.

So... that means that the either:

1) The provision in the contract can't mean "we have the write to breach whenever we feel like it"

2) or, that the TOS are unenforceable.

The wording in the TOS is designed specifically to not mean "we can breach whenever we want", but instead to mean "if you sell counterfeit goods through our service we will destroy them and not refund your money".

The words "we ... reasonably believe the item you sold is counterfeit" were deliberately chosen for this purpose. The fact that paypal can use its sole discretion just tips the scales in their favor. If they have reasonable evidence that something is fake, then they can destroy it, even if they haven't done due diligence to prove it's a fake.

The question comes down to wether or not paypal had reason to believe the item was counterfeit.

Their are certain cases where only a customer complaint would be sufficient to establish a "reasonable believe".

For example, if Picasso bought a painting that was said to be a Picasso original, and he called paypal and said "I didn't paint this, it's a fake", they would definetly be within their rights if they distroyed it, even if further investigation could have revealed he was lying.

In this particular case... you could potentially argue that the customer's complaint was in no way sufficient for paypal to reach a "reasonable believe". This does make the whole thing wildly open to judicial interpretation, however.

tl;dr lawyer up.

This is why it is important to record instruments with higher sample rates (192khz is standard) in order to fully preserve their sonic character for further processing.

This is one answer to the question "why do musicians record ultrasound," I hope it is correct. There are many answers given to this question and even a lot of sound engineers don't understand the concepts correctly, so hopefully I have got this right.

You also hear a lot of stuff about how filters need headroom to avoid creating aftefacts in the data; a LP filter creates more artefacts the sharper its cutoff curve, so therefore by having a lot of ultrasound one can have a very gradual cutoff (or a cheaper filter) and only discard data in the inaudible range. I'm less sure that this is true however.

Then there are a lot of people who think it's simply the usual "higher numbers are better" type of marketing games. They may well be right. All I know is, there is nowhere near enough double blind testing in the pro audio industry, and if they started doing in en-mass it would cause terrible trouble.

Hopefully, as usual, some expert will jump in here and lay down some solid facts. Be aware though that one cannot simply apply electromagnetic principles, it isn't always the same.

that might sound crazy, so let me give an example. cheap active speakers (the kind you plug into a computer) will often pick up radio transmissions from passing emergency vehicles. the speaker cable acts like an antenna and picks up the radio signal. now the radio signal is, of course, at radio frequencies, but there's some non-linearity in the amp that results in an audio signal (an understandable one) coming out of the speaker.

that's a fairly extreme example, but here's another more biologically believable one. perhaps there are frequencies which are high enough to be inaudible, but which influence the ear in how it responds to audible frequencies. for example, perhaps the ultra-high frequency signal stimulates the ear in some way that makes it more sensitive to audible higher frequencies. then you would hear a brighter tonal balance when listening live than when listening to a band-limited recording.

i am not saying this must happen; i am saying this may be the (physically reasonable) basis for some belief / rumour / knowledge in the audio business.

[also, note that the non-linearity must be in the ear; if it's in the surroundings then the mic will pick it up too. and it must be influenced by frequencies that are outside the recording bandwidth otherwise you'd hear it on playback.]

There are overtones picked up by the ear that you can't capture with a microphone and accurately play back with average computer speakers, at least in my experience.

Whether the loss in quality is the microphone's fault or the speakers' fault, I don't know. Regardless, there are sounds the musician hears and feels that not even the average in-person audience can hear, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's impossible to accurately judge violins based on digital recordings.

A company I worked for briefly that services the UK had its sales team in Canada, and its customer service team in India. Not saying Indians are stupid of course, but labor is certainly cheaper there, as compared to Canada.

In fact, he is not wrong to expect that reasonable regulation be imposed on a company which borrows and handles funds. Paypal's system is highly unusual in comparison to other comparable banking services and is predictably often the target of these types of complaints.

Florian says the law is wrong, that paypal should be regulated as a bank. In response, you reject regulation in general. His position makes a lot more sense than your own.

In my opinion their rules are exploitative and out of line with what I would expect from a company that I would do business with. (Edited to remove 'out of line with what rational people expect' comment, I do not presume to speak for anyone.)

"Cost of doing business"? ROTFL, I'm just a dude selling a handful of trinkets and baubles on eBay, once in a blue moon.

Your argument is like one of those math "proofs" that make sense internally, but are stemming from axioms utterly divorced from reality. You could "demonstrate" anything that way. You could even "demonstrate" how PayPal is "right" to keep my money for no good reason, or how Sony is "right" to have me waive my rights to sue them if I use their product. When they do it, it's called "EULA" and "cost of doing business" or some other kind of standard boilerplate bullshit like that.

But let me try the same tactics on their skin. Then it's called "theft" or "piracy" and I go to jail.

And what's the difference? They own immense quantities of cash, out of which they can afford to pay armies of lawyers and lobbyists, effectively superseding the law. I don't have that much cash, so I must dance to whatever tune they like to play.

All they have to do is couch this behavior in intricate pseudo-rational arguments like yours, or lofty but flawed rhetoric like you see all the time on TV, and "all is well" with the world.

This is bullshit. It needs to stop.

>So, the buyers would come with their own current violins and I would put my eBay specials AND my kid's $5,000 into the mix for the blind sound tests. The $5,000 violin was always one of the leaders but not always the winner.

They didn't go through anything like what Japan, Germany, or Russia did, with the cities razed by fighting (Stalingrad), fire-bombing (Tokyo or Dresden), or atomic bombs (Hiroshima & Nagasaki). If a French violin had survived the siege of Stalingrad - now that would be impressive. But just being in France? That's about as impressive as a random Englishman surviving the Battle of Britain.

The "buyer" accepted the risk that they were not legally protected when they voluntarily destroyed the seller's property.

I hope this gets taken to court, and that we get a clear answer.

(b) Paypal's terms are probably irrelevant here anyway unless they owned either the money or the instrument. If they don't have a valid legal claim on them, then they have no right to tell anyone else what to do with them, regardless of any document their lawyers write.

(c) Even if the terms are relevant, this policy is so obviously unreasonable that you can't assume any court is going to automatically uphold the contractual term.

(d) This is all to protect Paypal, not the buyer. Notwithstanding any of Paypal's legalese, and obviously without knowing all the details, it seems very possible that a court would hold that a contract of sale existed here between the buyer and seller directly, and that as such the buyer who destroyed the instrument but did not pay for it is either in breach of contract (and thus owes the money anyway) or guilty of theft/criminal damage/other similar offences (in which case they are potentially in bigger trouble and might actually have police showing up on their doorstep, though even in the best case for them if the violin was as specified then they have conveniently accepted what a valid level of compensation would be).

(e) The fact that the destruction was done at Paypal's request is probably irrelevant following such a finding, other than to the extent that Paypal may have some sort of indirect liability for the damages in a civil suit, or that whichever idiot working for them sent the request might even be regarded as an accessory to a crime if someone in authority wanted to make a point. Actually, I imagine that would shake their staff down pretty quickly, since no amount of contractual anything from Paypal's legal team is going to protect the staff personally in that sort of situation.

Standard disclaimers apply: I'm not a lawyer, but I have found that if you actually get your day in court then usually the court has some amount of common sense and a much smaller amount of tolerance for lawyers obviously trying to intimidate other citizens with legalese. Internet tough-guy defences pointing at tricky legalese don't always end well, if the Internet tough-guy law suit actually reaches a court room. It's usually the cost/inconvenience/lack of understanding of bringing a small-scale lawsuit that protects the companies from wronged individuals, not the power of their obviously one-sided form contracts.

I don't know if such an act would be legally viable, but it certainly seems morally reasonable to me.

(Yes, people have done physical violence against another for FAR less than $2500)